IHHS, the I Hate Horcruxes Society (was Re: Harry Horcrux redux)

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 155131

<SNIP>
> > Carol, wishing she'd never heard of Horcruxes
>
> Neri:
> I think we've finally reached the bottom of it. You simply don't
> like Horcruxes. The truth is that I don't like them much either.
> But it seems that JKR does, and this is what counts.


Count me in on the "don't like the whole horcrux angle" crowd.  First
of all, for those of us that have a D&D background the whole thing is
wearily familiar.  In fact, when I first read it my thought
was, "Okay, so Voldy's a lich with six phylacteries, check.  I wonder
what used comic book shop she found the D&D module in."

(For non-D&D people, a lich is a very powerful and evil wizard who
insures immortality by storing his soul, or a part thereof, in an
object called a phylactery.  He thus becomes a very dangerous kind of
undead and essentially unkillable unless you can get your hands on the
object he's stored his soul in.  But you have to be careful, because
those pesky evil wizard souls have a way of invading people's minds
and taking up residence.  Sound familiar? :-))

Not that I literally think she did base it on a D&D module.  Certain
tropes just keep coming back around.  Vampires drink blood and hide
from the sun.  Werewolves hate the full moon.  Heroes have prophecies
about them shortly before they are born.  Evil wizards tend to store
their souls in foreign objects.  But after all the build up the
horcruxes, like the prophecy, were ... well, rather ordinary and
anticlimactic -- although I'll grant that they weren't as blatantly
OBVIOUS as the prophecy.

The ordinariness of it is what I think has lots of people annoyed.  We
had strong hints and speculations of strange and original themes with
strong spiritual overtones.  Instead, it seems most of defeating
Voldemort will be purely mechanical - find the Maguffin and destroy
it, basically a video game in written form.

And the thing that I think has REALLY annoyed people is that she
waited until the eleventh hour to get all this started.  We went into
the sixth book with an enormous number of loose ends and a promise
that we would start getting answers.  Well, we got a lot of wheel
spinning, very few answers, and even more loose ends.  And to top it
all off instead of dealing with those loose ends it seems most of book
seven will be taken up with said video game.  Percy?  House Elves?
Corruption in the Ministry?  Hermione's arrogance or lack thereof?
House Unity?  The Founders and their world?  New regimes at Hogwarts?
Etcetera, etcetera?  Nope, no time.  Got to go get me a Maguffin!

Thus, I think a lot of people, people who otherwise come at the
Potterverse from VERY different angles, all end up standing shoulder
to shoulder, looking at the horcrux plotline, and as one scratch their
heads and say "Okay, that's nice, but really JKR, nobody cares.  Maybe
if you had started all this oh, two books ago at least.  But right
now, there are more interesting and important things for Harry to do
than chasing around all over God's Good Greenness looking for
Ravenclaw Cups, big snakes, and Lord only knows what else."

Then again, maybe Book seven will be 1200 pages long.  We haven't had
one of those since James Clavell's heyday.


Lupinlore